then I press the rest of the letters...” She peered down at the key-board and found them. “e...l...e...n. There! I have typed your name. If I were using the typewriter, your name would be printed on a piece of paper beneath the...the roller thing. See. Here it is.” She opened the manual to the picture of the typewriter with all of the parts named.
“You have to learn all of that just to write my name?” Her mother shook her head, laughed and lifted the pencil she held into the air. “I’ll use this, thank you.”
“Well, I am going to learn how to use this typewriter. And I am going to learn it without Mr. Thornberg’s help. And you can help me, Mama.” She carried the manual back to the desk. “When I have all of these keys memorized, and I have practiced enough that my fingers don’t trip all over each other trying to find them, I will sit over there by the bed and you can call out words for me to type. I will keep my eyes closed, and you can watch my fingers and tell me if I hit the right keys. I am going to type better and faster than anyone else at the Journal—including Mr. Thornberg. That will show him my value as an employee.”
She placed her fingers over the center row on the paper key-board and studied the top row on the left side. Q-W-E-R-T. Now, which fingers should she use...
* * *
The letters were blurring too much for her to practice any longer. Clarice blinked her eyes and glanced at her open locket watch she’d placed in the light cast by the oil lamp. One o’clock. She looked over at the bed and smiled. Her mother had set the writing box aside and succumbed to sleep close to two hours ago. And she was sleeping well. She hadn’t once moaned with pain.
Could the surcease of pain mean that her mother might walk again? Hope sprang to her heart. She would arrange for a doctor to come and see her mother as soon as she had the money. And that meant she had to stop practicing with the typewriter at work and concentrate on answering those letters. She wasn’t being paid to learn how to use the typewriter. And her mother’s care came first, even before her ambition to be a columnist for a real newspaper.
She closed the manual and slipped from her chair to take the writing box off the bed. Her mother’s Bible was open beside it, a verse marked with a small star in the margin. She averted her eyes. How could her mother still believe in God after all she had suffered? She picked up the writing box and placed it on the seat of the chair by the bed, where her mother could reach it, and glanced back at the Bible. The marked verse drew her eye. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
Well, that was certainly true. She would never have let her mother be crippled!
Trust me.
The thought was so clear it might have been spoken. She spun about and hurried back to the turret area, turned down the wick to dim the lamp and shrugged out of her dressing gown. The night was warm, but shivers prickled her flesh. She slipped beneath the blanket on the window seat and pulled it up around her neck, seeking the comfort of its softness and warmth. All was dark outside the windows. There were no stars to look at—nothing.
The silence of the night settled around her. Her heart ached with a longing she didn’t understand and refused to acknowledge. She turned onto her other side and stared at the dim spot of light, the lowered wick glowing against the darkness.
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